Alt text: O’RLY? generated book cover with a donkey, navy blue accent, header: “It’s only free if you don’t value your time”, title: “Handling Arch Linux Failures”, subtitle: “Mom, please cancel my today’s agenda!”

  • llii
    7·
    5 months ago

    My arch install is from 2015. It just works, why should I reinstall?

      • KubeRootEnglish
        3·
        5 months ago

        And reinstalling the packages, moving over all the configs, setting up the partitions and moving the data over? (Not in this order, of course)

        Cloning a drive would just require you to plug both the old and new to the same machine, boot up (probably from a live image to avoid issues), running a command and waiting until it finishes. Then maybe fixing up the fstab and reinstalling the bootloader, but those are things you need to do to install the system anyways.

        I think the reason you’d want to reinstall is to save time, or get a clean slate without any past config mistakes you’ve already forgotten about, which I’ve done for that very reason, especially since it was still my first, and less experienced, install.

      • partizan@lemm.ee
        1·
        5 months ago

        Well not really, cloning is much easier than reinstalling and then configuring everything again…

        I have LVM set up from the start, so usually I just copy the /boot partition to the new disk, and the rest is in a LVM volume group, so I just use pvmove from old disk to the new one, fix the bootloader and fstab UUIDs, and Im ready to reboot from new disk, while I didnt even left my running system, no live USB needed or anything. (Of course I messed it up a first few times, so had to fix from a live OS).

        But once you know all the quirks, I can be up and ready on a new drive withing 20mins (depends mainly on the pvmove), with all the stuff preserved and set